Formatting is a write operation to the drive. Meaning, more overwriting over what is already there (or lost). To recover files, there is NEVER a need to re-format a drive. It is a simple misnomer that things may be better, when they actually won't.

Aha ok. I thought I should do it because I have nowhere else to move (if I find it) all the ~350GB I lost except that hard drive. I'm gonna have to buy another HDD or I can write somehow back to it (which seems impossible to recover and write to it at the same time)?

Yes it is a good idea. This one has a bad sector either way but I could give it to my sister in an HDD enclosure as an external drive but getting a good value for money in my small town is very hard so it's gonna take some time. They are usually those WD caviar green which are cheap but bad.

Do you have any other idea what I should do now besides cloning the drive?

Thing is like I said it's hard to find a drive worth spending the money in my region and I will need to buy one if I wanted to clone it all. I sent a mail to a company and if I get a respond I'm going out and buying one.

At this point I'm even accepting that I probably lost it all. I just wish I could at least get a list of all my files if not files themselves. I don't even remember all the stuff that I lost but I'm going to need them at one point.

This is why I prefer WinHex, I can search volume for NTFS file system components. If I could find $MFT record I could probably rebuild boot sector manually. At least to a condition where DR software would recognise it as an NTFS partition.

By all means try UFS, it is pretty good at rebuilding FS structures. But take note of making a clone of the HDD.. as mentioned by others above.

_________________<itch>скратчиIf you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

This is why I prefer WinHex, I can search volume for NTFS file system components. If I could find $MFT record I could probably rebuild boot sector manually. At least to a condition where DR software would recognise it as an NTFS partition.

DMDE's "NTFS search" will find all NTFS components including MFT and INDX records, if they exist. In fact the OP's search results display a count of the numbers of such records.

Tools -> Search for Special Sector will find particular file system components.

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